FACILITIES PEOPLE BUPA
A HEALTHY MOVE TO FM Leaving Pizza Hut a few years ago led Laura Wilson-Hutt into facilities management where the catering contract now falls under her remit
NEIL TURNER
NAME: Laura Wilson-Hutt JOB TITLE: Assistant facilities manager WORKS FOR: Bupa
As Bupa’s assistant facilities manager, based in Salford, I am mainly responsible for managing the catering contractor at the site. Together with Will Greene, the campus’s facilities manager, I was responsible for the recent tendering process, which saw Charlton House shown the door after 15 years with the firm and the arrival of catering provider Baxter Storey. I’m one of two assistant facilities managers on the campus, and part of a 31-strong in-house team spread across the UK. I, alongside my colleague, Malachy Walsh, look after the contracts with me looking after the gym, restaurant, hard services and in-house reception team while Malachy looks after post and stationery, cleaning, security and the in-house facilities admin team. It’s a busy, varied role and a world away from my previous job in retail which was no fun at all. I worked for Pizza Hut as an assistant manager and after being made redundant found my first job in facilities management.
I moved to the BBC in Salford, starting out as a facilities administrator which saw me doing a bit of everything from catering to reception. Three years ago I joined Bupa, initially as a facilities administrator. I like FM because it’s very people-oriented. Every day is completely different which is the complete opposite of Pizza Hut where every day was structured exactly the same for me. A typical week involves a meeting with each of the contractors I am responsible for where we look at performance and issues arising. We encourage them to constantly come up with new ways of doing things and to bring innovation into the contracts.
Good communication All the Bupa FM contractors, myself and the facilities manager come together once a week for a joint meeting. It’s a good opportunity to get them us together so, for example, if something that the maintenance team is doing affects the cleaning team, they can talk about it. Then they don’t come to us about issues and instead talk to each other and solve any problems. Sometimes it can be tough and I’ve felt like “piggy in the middle” between contractors in the past. But now the wider FM team gets involved with
something like the cleaning audit of the restaurant and gym, so we can all work together to improve the facilities function. With the restaurant at Bupa as my main focus I was heavily involved in procuring a new catering supplier – going out on site visits, assessing suppliers’ tender documents and presentations. Starting with 12 potential suppliers, I helped to narrow this down to five for site visits and then the final two. Baxter Storey now handle the catering at our site and staff feedback has been good, once a few early teething problems were ironed out. The main complaint has been that we are no longer selling Muller Rice, so things can’t be bad. It is important for us to interact with the people using the building wherever possible and we tend to do this through gym forums, learning at work days, forums and FM walkabouts. My job is not just about being on the phone and answering emails.
We’re strongly encouraged to regularly walk around the building. It’s called ‘taking off the seatbelt’. Creating a campus approach and ensuring staff talk to each other, not just across the Salford site, but internationally (Bupa serves 10m customers in over 190 countries) is really important. We recently launched Bupa Live, a networking forum for all staff in all countries to keep in touch.
Shared knowledge Sharing experiences is high on our agenda. I conduct fortnightly video conference calls with my fellow assistant facilities managers across the other sites to discuss site issues; while the FMs have a weekly call and the facilities administrators have a quarterly video conference. Once a year, the entire FM team across the UK are brought together for a couple of days off-site. “It’s a great opportunity for us all to get together; we always learn from one another and it’s a fantastic teambuilding exercise.”
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